In the local news section of the Washington Post over the weekend was an article headlined: “A man convicted of exposure returns to W&OD Trail to rape, police say”. The suspect is one Denis Humberto Navarette Romero, a 31-year-old Honduran national, though you have to get 11 paragraphs into the article to find that fact, and two more to discover he’s illegally in the United States. By the way, he also has more than one prior and they’re mostly all disturbing, raising the question of why he’s still here.
The Alleged Attack
The Post described that incident as follows:
Officers arrested Navarette Romero around 9 p.m. Monday in a parking lot in the 700 block of Station Street, where he had the cellphone of the woman who reported being raped, according to court records. Police said she was walking along the trail after leaving a bar in downtown Herndon when Navarette Romero grabbed her, forced her to the ground and assaulted her.
Fox News, in its reporting on the case, expounds on the facts of that offense:
The victim told police that Romero brazenly grabbed her and forced her to the ground where he proceeded to rape her.
Thankfully, the victim was able to fight off Romero and run away to get help. Police were able to locate Romero shortly after the attack.
The alleged victim and Navarette Romero didn’t know each other, and Herndon Police Chief Maggie DeBoard claims it’s the first “stranger rape” her department has investigated in her 12 years on the job.
The Suspect’s Record
Both outlets explain that police quickly determined Navarette Romero had a lengthy rap sheet in the area, dating back to 2018 when Herndon Police investigated a report that he had fondled a 14-year-old.
Herndon is in Fairfax County, and when a county detective investigated that claim, “the officer was told that Navarette Romero had exposed himself to a 13-year-old and 10-year-old a year before”, according to the Post.
None of those crimes resulted in a conviction as per the paper because the cops’ “attempts to speak with the people involved were met with resistance”, apparently because the children’s family “did not want any problems”.
I’ll return to that point, below, but in any event, he again came to the attention of authorities again in June 2022, after police received a complaint that he had smacked a woman on the backside at a local restaurant.
The Post explains that officers responding to that incident located Navarette Romero “in a nearby Kohl’s parking lot, where he resisted arrest by choking one officer and striking another in the face”.
Though charged with four offenses related to that incident (including two felony counts of assault on a police officer), he took a plea and was convicted of two counts of assault and battery and one count of resisting arrest, serving six months in jail and being ordered into mental health and substance abuse counseling.
Navarette Romero was thereafter found riding in a stolen car (the driver was shot after he fled and drew a weapon on police), and though he was not charged, shortly thereafter cops encountered him again when responding to a complaint that he showed up at a family gathering uninvited and assaulted the complainant.
Somewhere along the way he also reportedly picked up charges for trespass, liquor-law violations, and indecent exposure, eventually pleading “guilty resisting arrest and lewd, indecent or obscene acts in 2024” for which he received a 240-day sentence in the local jail, according to the Post.
His full criminal record and whether he served out that sentence is unclear, because the Post reports Navarette Romero was “convicted of exposing himself to a woman out walking her dog on the Washington & Old Dominion Trail” (W&OD Trail) in October and allegedly committed the rape on the same trail four days after he was released.
“Indecent exposure” under Virginia law would appear to include the lewd, indecent, or obscene acts the Post describes, but it’s a class 1 misdemeanor carrying a sentence of up to 12 months and given Navarette Romero’s track record, he should have been sentenced on the upper end of that scale and served most of his time – which wouldn’t be the case if he was released roughly a month later.
The Response
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) didn’t pull any punches when he heard the story, tweeting on November 24:
I am heartsick for this victim and outraged that local Fairfax County officials recklessly release violent illegal immigrants who should have been prosecuted and deported. This is a dereliction of their most basic duty to keep people safe. Prioritizing violent illegal immigrants… https://t.co/sqKUqbsGeg
— Glenn Youngkin (@GlennYoungkin) November 24, 2024
Curiously, among those who couldn’t believe that Navarette Romero was allowed to stay was Navarette Romero himself, which brings me to paragraphs 11 and 12 of the Post article:
In court filings this week, Navarette Romero is described as a Honduran national who worked in construction and has lived in the Fairfax community for 11 years. Herndon police records paint a fuller picture of his life in recent years, with a string of arrests dating to 2022 appearing to document bouts of homelessness and challenges with mental health and substance use.
Police found him drinking outside a 7-Eleven, smoking marijuana behind a McDonald’s and sleeping in baseball dugouts and parking garages, records show. Once, an officer reported approaching him as he lay facedown in Bready Park, sober but distraught that he had nowhere to go and asking to be deported so he could go home. [Emphasis added.]
Why Is He Still Here?
It’s not until you get to paragraph 13 in the Post article that his immigration status is revealed: “Police said that he is an undocumented immigrant”. So, why – if he was begging to go back to Honduras – was he still in the United States to allegedly commit the rape he was charged with in suburban Herndon?
That sentence continues, “a lack of official government identification contributed to the varied spellings of his name across court cases and localities”.
Respectfully, that’s nonsense. A lack of government identification and varied spellings of a name would not have prevented authorities from uncovering his numerous offenses and his illegal status, because cops – federal, state, and local – don’t rely solely on self-identification or even proper ID documents.
They fingerprint offenders and pull rap sheets. That’s what they did when I was an INS trial attorney three decades ago, and apparently, it’s what the cops did in the serial cases involving Navarette Romero, too. Again, from the Post:
Kathryn Pavluchuk, general counsel at the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Office, said federal immigration authorities are notified every time an undocumented person is arrested and then fingerprinted at the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center. But in the four times Navarette Romero had been incarcerated at the jail, Pavluchuk said, the sheriff’s office never received a detainer or judicial immigration warrant from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE did not immediately respond to calls or emails.
So why didn’t ICE pick him up? Let me tell you why I think that didn’t happen.
The unresolved 2018 investigation aside, all of Navarette Romero’s alleged offenses happened in 2022 and thereafter, which is to say after DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a September 2021 memo sharply restricting ICE’s ability to investigate, arrest, detain, prosecute, and remove illegal aliens.
Under that memo, ICE must consider various “aggravating” and “mitigating” factors before launching an investigation. The former include the seriousness of the offenses, while the latter encompass a range of factors, including “a mental condition that may have contributed to the criminal conduct” and the offender’s family ties in the United States.
With due respect to those struggling with psychological issues, there’s no reason to expose the public to predation by removable criminal aliens simply because their mental impairment is, in part, driving their criminality. In fact, it’s likely one of the best reasons to remove them.
Fairfax County’s “Trust Policy”
But ignoring the danger Navarette Romero posed was likely what ICE officers were forced to do under the Mayorkas memo, though it’s likely not the only reason why Navarette Romero is still here.
Although local officials deny it, Fairfax County, Va., is a notorious “sanctuary jurisdiction”, and in January 2021 the local board there adopted what it calls the “Public Trust and Confidentiality Policy” (Trust Policy). As the Fairfax County Times explained in August:
Under the policy, residents who are illegally in the United States and arrested for crimes are being released back into the community rather than being turned over to [ICE], which enforces immigration laws. Recently, the Fairfax County Times queried the Washington, D.C., office of the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) about seven people who were arrested in Fairfax County over a one-week period. An Enforcement and Removal Operations spokesman said that six of the seven people were illegally in the United States.
The Trust Policy is emblematic of the blather devised by JV-level politicos full of sanctimony (“One Fairfax recognizes that the County’s ethnic, racial, and linguistic diversity is a key source of its strength”) and ignorant of actual facts (“Cooperation with civil administrative immigration enforcement is especially problematic because it lacks the constitutional protections of criminal law, and ICE civil detention requests are frequently issued in error”), and apparently, it’s now having a real impact on public safety in the county.
Chief DeBoard, who plainly wants would-be stranger rapists off her streets, laid out the challenges police departments in such sanctuary jurisdictions face, telling the local ABC affiliate:
My job as a police chief here is to protect everyone in this community, that includes people that may not be here legally. . .. And part of the problem that we have is, how do I protect that group, that migrant group that may not be here if they don't report to us? So part of the messaging here is we don't want anybody to feel unsafe here, and that includes the community that may be undocumented here, so it's important to know that we will not turn them over to ICE if they're calling for help. We would never do that. Our goal is to get people out of the community who are preying on anyone here in town, and we can't do that without cooperation. So I'm hoping that they will trust us.
The Center has shown that sanctuary policies don’t make it more likely that otherwise “law-abiding” illegal alien victims will report crimes to the police. In fact, the chief’s fundamental premise – that non-cooperation with immigration authorities makes the community safer – is in error, as my colleagues Steve Camarota and Jessica Vaughan have explained:
With no evidence that immigrants are less likely to report crimes, the primary objection to cooperation between police and ICE appears to be invalid. However, the public-safety benefits of such cooperation are real. When local officers and ICE are able to share information, criminal aliens who are causing problems can be identified and deported instead of returned to the streets. Federal immigration authorities can remove criminal aliens, even when witness intimidation is a problem, as it often is with gang members, because deportation typically does not require witness testimony. None of this can happen if police are not allowed to work with ICE.
In other words, the only people protected by sanctuary policies are criminal aliens. Which brings me back to the family that refused out of fear to cooperate with Fairfax County detectives in connection with the 2018 allegations against Navarette Romero – allegations that arose roughly a year after Fairfax County issued its first “community trust” resolution.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates there are 76,000 “unauthorized immigrants” in the greater Fairfax area out of a population of about 1.85 million, meaning about 4 percent of the population is here illegally.
I have more than three decades of experience dealing with criminal alien issues, and after reviewing the crimes Navarette Romero has either been investigated for or convicted of, I believe that the victims in most or all of them were among the 4 percent of the community that is here illegally.
That would explain the lack of cooperation the cops received, because those victims of all people would know that under the county’s policies, the offender would be convicted, serve his (likely short) sentence, and return right to the community from which he came.
Consider the following statement by Chief DeBoard:
The problem with deporting him right now would be there is a strong chance that he could end up back in this country again . . .. The danger is, if he's not held accountable for his crimes here, and he's simply deported, we would have no way to keep him from coming back into the country.
With all due respect, keeping him out of the country is DHS’s problem, but her concerns border on the nonsensical: I agree he should be incarcerated if convicted, but once he’s been deported, he’s probably not coming back, and if he did, he’d be facing years in federal prison.
Only under a non-enforcement regime like the one Mayorkas has created would such concerns have any validity, but if you think about it, the chief’s statements are akin to asserting there’s no reason to put him in jail because he may escape; maybe that will happen, but it most likely won’t.
Regardless of whether he’s handed over to ICE and deported and returns, not handed over to ICE and convicted at the state level and then released, or simply released without being convicted, he’ll be back in the community, but of those three options, deportation makes it exponentially less likely he’ll return.
Why are serious alien criminals who beg to be deported released into the community to reoffend? Because local – and federal – officials interpose themselves between those criminals and ICE in a misguided and senseless attempt to “protect” the very victims who end up paying the price.